Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [66]
The FBI’s surveillance index, started in 1941, contains 13,500 entries. While the identity of the individuals tapped is withheld on privacy grounds, the index establishes that Edgar’s FBI tapped or bugged thirteen labor unions, eighty-five radical political groups and twenty-two civil rights organizations.
In 1940, secure in his relationship with President Roosevelt, emboldened by his new and formidable powers, Edgar prepared for World War II.
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‘Hoover was a megalomaniac, an egomaniac, and a prude of the first order. He was a thorn in our side.’
A. M. Ross-Smith, wartime British Intelligence official in the U.S.
For Edgar, the war really began nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, with a letter from a retired boxer. Gene Tunney, the undefeated world heavyweight champion of the twenties, had often met Edgar and Clyde on their frequent visits to Yankee Stadium. Now, in early 1940, he found himself passing on a discreet message from a man he had first met at military boxing events in his youth, a man who had since become a toplevel British secret agent.
This was William Stephenson, known to millions today as the protagonist of A Man Called Intrepid, the bestselling book about his achievements in World War II. Stephenson, a Canadian the same age as Edgar, was an extraordinary figure – World War I flying ace and prison camp escapee, radio and television pioneer, and hugely successful businessman. His mission, when he asked Tunney to make contact with Edgar, was under the personal command of Winston Churchill.
Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had been engaged in secret correspondence with President Roosevelt for months. The President fervently wanted to save Europe from the Nazis, but was not yet free to help openly. Powerful forces in the United States were opposed to involvement in the war, and a presidential election was looming. At this critical time, Churchill picked Stephenson as his personal representative in the United States.
In April 1940, in Room 39 at the Admiralty, the two men discussed a momentous secret. With invasion threatening, Britain’s military was in utter disarray. The country was virtually broke. But Britain had obtained the captured Enigma machine, the key to decoding German military communications – and potentially the key to victory. Churchill decided that, for now, President Roosevelt should be the one foreigner to know Britain had Enigma. ‘To him, and to him alone,’ he told Stephenson, ‘the truth should be confided … Our daily intelligence summaries should be delivered to him through the FBI.’
Edgar himself was not to be privy to the intelligence from Enigma,1 but his cooperation was vital; and, if the relationship was not to be hamstrung by American neutrality, it had to be a closely held secret. That was why their mutual friend, Gene Tunney, was used to deliver Stephenson’s first, informal letter. Its contents remain unknown, but Edgar was persuaded. He telephoned Tunney to say, yes, he would see Churchill’s man.
The two men met that April at Edgar’s new home on Thirtieth Place, N.W., a house he had bought half-built for $25,000, before his mother died. Annie had not liked the place, but now, two years after her death, he had moved in alone. Before getting down to business, Stephenson reflected on what the house might tell him about the Director of the FBI. He noticed the meticulously ordered clutter of ornaments, the myriad photographs of Edgar himself. He noted, especially, the profusion of male nudes.
‘There were,’ Stephenson would recall, ‘nude figurines, nudes on the stairway, pictures of rather suggestive male nudes, all over the place.’ He would soon meet Edgar in the company of Clyde, and recognize them as a homosexual couple. Many years later, Stephenson would refer darkly